Strategy in Left Behind: What If?
by geistklempner
Summary: Could the Unity Army have won the siege of Petra? What if Carpathia had been a smarter opponent? Does The Other Light have a chance? A collection of snippets showing what happens if you give Left Behind to wargamers for analysis.
1. Siege of Petra

_The Unity Army spends their last 18 months on Earth besieging the walled city of Petra, and doing an abysmal job of it. How could they have won it instead?_

* * *

First off, a cavalry charge is actually less farfetched than it might sound: the old cities in Europe and the Middle East have plenty of narrow alleys in which a car cannot maneuver, so motorcycles and horses make sense. This is why riot police has mounted units.

However, making this the cornerstone of your tactics makes little sense. I am assuming that by this point Nicolae, indwelt by Satan, has absorbed much of the latter's Bronze Age mindset rather than using the advice of his modern strategists. The hands-on style of leadership seems to line up with that.

The battle of Petra is described as a medieval-style siege, and it is; Team Blue is all inside a walled city, and occasionally makes sorties for supplies; Team Red has a much larger army surrounding the city, and the overhead of keeping it provisioned.

So, what did Carpathia do wrong and what could he have done in order to win?

First off, Carpathia ignored the fact that Petra effectively had infinite provisions (manna and quails, and fresh water) while his army did not. Most sieges in history have been resolved peacefully, in that the city wasn't stormed, because both sides did the math and realied which of the two armies was going to run out of supplies first. This is unusual to say the list; the closest modern parallel is the Berlin Airlift, and that solved in favor of the "besieged". Carpathia, having grown in an Eastern European country, should be acutely aware of that episode as a defeat for the Soviet side - while it's unlikely that he would have learned it in state-controlled Romanian schools, he would've picked it up during his diplomatic studies.

Second, Carpathia ignored the tremendous force multiplier that a modern military force can be. He deploys his artillery only after it stops working due to supernatural interference - knowingly - and makes no use of its beyond-the-horizon capabilities.

Third, Carpathia seems more interested in the PR aspect of the war than in actual operation; he makes grandiouse pronouncements and gets in the way of military operations, and chooses a siege-breaking strategy that is designed to look good to him rather than being effective. Overall, the author gives a good portrait of Carpathia as someone who is in the terminal grip of megalomania. Some parallels may be drawn with the excellent film Das Untergang, with bunker-bound Hitler screaming orders at nonexistent divisions.

Carpathia, as a charismatic leader, is used to at least appearing to lead from the front and gives very broad, unambiguous orders to his generals, much like Hitler did - this effectively forces even competent generals to follow an incompetent plan. However, there was enough wiggle room to allow the Unity Army to win the siege.

Initially, the situation at Petra looked exactly like a medieval siege (as opposed to, say, the siege of Sarajevo in 1995, which the authors in real life and the characters in the story would have been aware of). It is often quipped that generals are always ready to fight the last war; in this case, it would have been an asset, since the history of traditional siege warfare is extremely well documented. One thing that should be clear to a modern general is that barring tactical brilliance or a sudden reversal of fortune, sieges are won or lost at the outset. The breaching assault, if there even is one, is usually the culmination of a period of time dedicated to grinding down the defender's resources faster than one's own; this may be accomplished by simply waiting and foraging in the knowledge that the defenders cannot acquire new supplies, but throughout history many creative ways to force the other team to expend more resources than one's own have been employed. Biological warfare was invented in sieges, by catapulting corpses of the diseased dead humans or cattle; many creative ways to start a fire in the defending cities were devised, from using birds carrying embers to the first attempts at precision rocket artillery.

A competent Unity Army officer would know all this, and use the accumulated experience of millennia to try to break the defendants long before the final charge. A shrewd Unity Army officer would also realize that the higher-ups are not thinking straight, and operate in a mode of seeking forgiveness for what got done rather than permission for what is yet to do.

The siege of Petra lasts six months. That is a significant amount of time; on one hand, modern armies take longer to mobilize than ancient ones, it being a much more complicated matter than "grab your sword and fight the horde"; on the other. the besieging army has literally the entire world's remaining military infrastructure at its disposal.

Proper recon (by drone, which was already an option in the mid-90s in Israel as they were the first adopters of the technology and by now Israel has largely been invaded, occupied, and pacified - or by conventional aircraft if that is not an option) would make it obvious that Petra is effectively self-sufficient; Yahweh has organized His own Berlin airlift by means of a water source, manna and small birds. It's not specified how electricity and the Internet is stil in place, but presumably the Unity Army is allowing that infrastructure to remain connected to the larger grid as a way to gain intel, given that the Petra inhabitants seem pretty open with sharing photos online. This mirrors recent events in which Facebook posts of Daesh militants have been used to help confirm air strikes.

There are a number of ways by which the Unity Army can disrupt the airlift. The most obvious is by damaging the water supply; while bringing a tunnel-boring machine to Petra and reaching the source within six months would probably be unviable, the source can be disrupted by other methods. First, seismometers would be deployed around the city, outside the walls, and used to determine the approximate location of the source; then, sapper teams would begin mining under the city in order to reach the source. Since environmental concerns are not an issue and neither is doing damage to the city above - that would be a bonus, if anything - the work can proceed swiftly. Once the source is reached, it can be diverted using the mining tunnel as drainage, stoppered, or poisoned by the use of any number of chemical-warfare agents or pathogens.

Disrupting the food supply would be harder, since the manna just appears. The birds can easily be intercepted by setting up targeting radars around Petra and using them as microwave beams to kill or disorient the birds before they can reach the city, but this would only stop Petrans from receiving protein; the besieged could live on manna alone for a few years, although they would be debilitated come the time of the final assault.

Cutting the power in Petra is a fairly obvious option; while Carpathia does not order this before the breaching assault, it would severely limit the Petrans' ability to perform any manufacturing inside the city. Ordinarily, this would considerably lower the quality of life inside the city, maybe even enough to cause at least part of the population to want to capitulate; however, given that the Petrans have unshakable faith in their ultimate victory, the pro-deescalation faction would likely be small and ignored. As it stands, keeping the power and the Net on is probably the better choice, especially considering that the Petrans have enough manpower and too little beginning manufacturing ability to set up any considerable amount of automated defenses that a last-minute power outage might disrupt.

Going back to traditional tactics, while a direct bombardment is shown to be ineffective, it would likely have been attempted; even when there is no bombing campaign planned, mortar shots flying inside cities and fortified bases are a fact of life in a low-intensity conflict, being effective ways to ramp up fear for little expenditure. It would have been noticed quickly by Unity Army field officers that mortar rounds would consistently fail to work. At this point, a competent field officer would at the very least call in the army engineers to analyze the situation; a competent field officer with a competent chain of command to back him or her up would very quickly set up a testing program, at the very least to the extent of throwing things at Petra and seeing what sticks. A few obvious options occur; while a wise field officer would prefer to take the city without a shot, diplomatic options would requrie the approval of a Nicolae Carpathia that has since descended into insanity, and would not be available to the commander of the local forces.

Kinetic bombardment. Inert shells are cheap to produce even on short order, or can be retrofit from high-explosive shells. While this greatly reduces damage inflicted, it guarantees that some damage would be; there is no mechanism inside an inert lump of metal that can fail. Saturation bombardment, even in the miraculous happenstance that it caused no casualties, would eventually destroy enough infrastructure to force the Petrans to sally out. At minimum, inert shells could be used to batter down the walls.

Radiological dispersal. Launching small projectiles designed to open upon landing and release radioactive material is a much simpler project, from an engineering and logistics standpoint, than restarting a nuclear program - and has the advantage of plausible deniability since Carpathia is in control of the media and can report that the swath of sudden deaths in petra is due to natural or even supernatural causes rather than radiation poisoning. Extreme caution would have to be exercised during deployment, of course.

Gas. Petra is described in the book as a tightly walled city, enough so that simply saturating the area inside the walls with chlorine would be a relatively simple feat to achieve - the besiegers would merely have to mount a firefighting package on an AVLB and use it to duct the gas in over the wall, no artillery necessary. The defenders would have no choice between allowing deadly gas in and opening the gates. This method has the advantage of requiring very little R&D effort.

Farenheit 451. A similar method to that described above could be used to vector in crude oil, by constructing an annex to a nearby pipeline if necessary. After that, it would take one spark to flood Petra in flames. This may even appeal to an insane Carpathia if presented as poetic justice. Again, the defenders would have no choice between opening the gates and being flooded with death. The potential effectiveness of this method is documented by the 1991 Kuwait oil well fires, with which both attackers and defenders would be at least familiar. This method likewise has the advantage of requiring very little R&D effort, although it would be quite expensive to implement.

Poisoning the well. A method to do so has been discussed above; another possibility is to "poison the well" less literally, by obtaining a manna sample and devising a chemical that would react with it making it unpalatable or even poisonous; this chemical can then be introduced by any of the above methods. The obvious difficulty here is obtaining a sample, as manna has an extremely limited shelf life.

Blotto Box. Instead of cutting power to Petra, it would be easy for an engineering team to replace the transformers feeding the city in order to increase line voltage; a similar system could be used to send lethal voltages through the phone and net infrastructure. At minimum, this would destroy all alectrical equipment in the city; at best, it would cause random casualties as they touch an appliance whose ground wire has been force-connected to three-phase power. This would only work once, but would be a good way to demoralize the defenders as they would find themselves unable to trust even touching most of their remaining technology.

Note that most of the tactics showcased above constitute war crimes in their own right; given that this article assumes that we are siding with the Antichrist, this should not be an issue. Arguably, an ethical Unity Army local commander could implement many of these measures reasoning that every Petran dead goes directly to Heaven, at least until prophecy is successfully derailed, but the ethics of fighting for the preservation of humanity against an angry God are best discussed elsewhere. However, an ethical Unity Army officer may choose to puruse a different tactic altogether.

Riot Control. The Unity Army has a variety of nonlethal weapons available, from nauseant agents (which can be deployed as the lethal agents would in the stratagems above) to dazzling lasers and cloud-piercing spotlights to large speakers. While the LRAD system was still in development when the Rapture is supposed to have happened, and would likely not have come into operation by the siege of Petra, quantity can substitute for quantity - large conventional speakers can be assembled, mounted on vehicles, and used to blast dischords at the besieged until exhaustion sets in. Flamethrower guitars are, of course, optional but highly recommended. This tactic would be known to Unity Army and Petrans alike to be effective after the Waco incident of 1994, and has the definite advantage of being usable for PR purposes, since it would allow Carpathia to treat the siege as a riot or a standoff rather than a war. Furthermore, it remains a relatively nonviolent way of bringing the war to a close; the Petrans do, in a sense, want an epic last stand, and containment and harassment has the side benefit of denying them it.

Assuming a sane Carpathia, his best option would be to de-escalate the matter diplomatically; the supposed man of peace could put on his older hat and show up at the gates of Petra with a blanket pardon and perhaps even a stipulation indicating that the Remnant may have any one major city of their own choosing, or remain in Petra and enjoy a land grant of some territory around the city. This tactic would, of course, benefit from cutting Petran power and internet a few weeks prior, maybe deploy the riot control assets and use them once or twice to make the point that they are an option, and then finally make the offer once the Petrans have had time to resent pre-modern living conditions.

It would allow Carpathia to remain in control of most of the world, derail prophecy, and possibly even enlist Christian Remnant help in recovering from the events of the Apocalypse; the offer should be genuine, and the Unity Army demobilized back to where a hypothetical Petran land grant would end (or demobilized entirely and deployed for civil protection duties). This all but guarantees Carpathia a major PR victory; if the Petrans accept, he has traded the safety of Earth and his own rule of it for what is likely to remain an insignificant enclave in the middle of a culture focused on reconstruction, and asset at best, and a curiosity at worst. If the Petrans refuse, he can come across to his own people - and by any objective measure - as the more reasonable party, with the added bonus that the Remnant enclave would remain in an area that is already more or less fortified and under control.

Taking the long view, short of extreme cultural models prevailing, most historians would have to admit that a force fighting with Biblical plagues that slayed millions and destroyed an ecosystem, and a force fighting with riot control systems intended to minimize casualties, are most assuredly not on the same moral standing - another PR coup for a sane Carpathia.

In conclusion, the siege of Petra was almost entirely Carpathia's to lose - Carpathia's inability to derail prophecy is in good part due to his own arrogance; his stated aim was always to follow the prophecies and then derail them at the last minute, but he failed to do the necessary prep work to do so, spent time and resources grandstanding rather than advancing his goal, and much like every losing general in a guerrilla fight, allowed himself to believe that conventional tactics would win an unconventional war. Fancying himself Caesar in Gaul, and forgetting that Caesar's victories were largely due to finesse rather than overwhelming forces, he ended up Nixon in Viet Nam. Carpathia loses because he is dumb, not because he is evil, and I credit LaHaye and Jenkins for making this point in a nuanced way.

From a story standpoint, another interesting question is, what might Carpathia do AFTER winning, assuming any one of these strategies worked?

An insane, Bronze-Age mindset Carpathia would likely allow the situation to degenerate into warlordism; Jesus might still come back at any time, or the chain of Biblical prophecies might be broken; Carpathia may be in charge of the world, but it's a dying world - starvation has reared its ugly head again, the ecosystem is compromised, and what modern facilities remain would not last very long. Before long, Carpathia might find himself nominally in charge of a Mad Max style wasteland, with little effective power beyond the armed reach of his personal guard. At least, if his field commander had chosen the "nonlethal" stratagem to open up Petra, Carpathia would have a speaker truck to rally his warband with.

A sane Carpathia would funnel all the remaining Unity Army resources into reconstruction. By the end of his lifespan - let's say the late 2030s - the world would be unified, well on the way to recovery, and quite possibly operated by an efficient secular government if Carpathia's initial promises are to be believed; humanity would trade some freedom of religion for a technological utopia. (This might be a good prologue to the Underground Zealot series, actually).


	2. Smarter Opponent

_Nicolae Carpathia is described as clever, cunning, and charismatic. However, being indwelt by Satan severely cramps his style, making him into a fairly ineffective opponent strategically. What if... Thanks to Child of Music and Dreams who challenged me to write a Left Behind epilogue that still results in a Yahwist victory._

* * *

The timeline deviates around "The Remnant". This gives us about 3 years before the Glorious Appearing.

Carpathia has a talk with an unnamed underling. Carpathia decides to call off the siege. Satan asks what the hell he's doing. Carpathia explains that it is the most rational thing to do. Satan reminds Carpathia who's boss, de-indwells him, and threatens him with withering. Carpathia's security detail shows up after seeing Carpathia being tossed around the room by nothing visible. Satan kills them quickly and messily.

Automated alarms trip and an actual Army contingent shows up to defend their boss. Satan manages to repel almost all the ordnance thrown at him, but is subdued, at great human cost after being shot in the chest with a LRAD and dogpiled. The siege is lifted, much to the Petrans' confusion.

Fast forward a week or so. Satan is in custody. Carpathia goes into surgery for a heart and lung transplant and ends up in a Davros-like life support chair. He uses the three frog-like spirits to keep up the pretense that he is healthy, keeping them somewhat loyal on pain of pain, but since they will not follow orders - one of them tries to resume the siege when he is brought in front of camera - Carpathia just has to splice videos of them, and communicate to the world like that.

In Petra there is ardent discussion on what to do to make sure that the prophecies do not derail. Stay put and trust in God? Turn terrorist in an attempt to provoke the Unity Army into resuming the siege or outright attacking? Leave?

The Unity Army corps of engineers clears out the Jerusalem neighborhood at the top of the Mount of Olives, cuts the mount itself into three north to south to prevent it from being east north to west and justifies all this by building two canals in the cuts.

The Tribulation Force members that are still in America are likewise uncertain as to what to do. The Unity Army is leaving them alone but under surveillance.

The Earth's ecosystem is devastated. Carpathia has to put nearly every able bodied human on Earth who will obey him to work doing environmental cleanup, and has to impose rationing. Rather than trying to starve the Christians out, he makes sure that some Christians enclaves receive double rations, as if by mistake. This causes a lot of suspicion between them and everyone else.

The various Christian enclaves call a meeting, which is hard to get to due to the deteriorated state of the world infrastructure, and the various leaders yell at each other about possible moles, spies and plants until a decision is made to pray together about it, at which point it becomes obvious that it's just Carpathia's dirty trick.

Carpathia's PR department pivots this by publicizing the meeting (of course it was being spied on, who needs to plant moles when you have superior SIGINT) and its resolution to keep things as they are, this causes Christians to be liked even less by the rest of the population. Carpathia fixes the "ration glitch" after a few weeks, and decrees that ration chits will be shared equally between "loyalists", "lukewarms", and Christian rebels because it's the only way to make things fair without setting up a massive bureaucracy.

A few cries of Communism are rebuffed with pointing out that this is what most countries had to do during WW2; Carpathia recycles British war posters, mottos etc. wholesale and asks people to keep a stiff upper lip. The news start showing devastated lands and seas as "Acts of God" again, trying to paint Yahweh as the enemy.

Two parallel briefings at each faction's high command. The Christians are in high spirits: they know that deliverance is coming soon regardless of what their enemy does, and hazard picking a date for it. The Unity Government are pessimistic - it's obvious that despite the environmental cleanup work, the damage to the planet is extensive enough that it's time to start considering culling the population to last a bit longer (and there's no permanent fix in sight). Too many species lost, too much poison in the sea and so on.

Satan has been listening in to the latter discussion from his containment system, and has a proposal - let the prophecy return to its rails, and then derail it again AFTER Jesus restores the Earth to verdancy but BEFORE the sheep-and-goats judgment. Carpathia mulls it over, and decides to start with let's have doomsday clocks in major cities and on TV, taken straight from Tsion's preaching. The Christians object that "nobody knows the hour" but agree that it's probably pretty accurate.

Dwindling resources force some terrible compromises - violent criminals "given mercy" by quick execution and organ harvesting rather than wasting food on them; nonviolent criminals to be given reclamation work in biohazard zones; euthanasia to be made accessible and pretty much encouraged for the people who can't work. Carpathia worries that he has become the dictator that the Christians always painted him as. Satan taunts him and proposes his plan again; Carpathia accuses him of wanting to lose.

An infiltration blitz by the Tribulation Force exposes Carpathia's decrepit state to the public. Satan demands that they free him before they return from the raid, but of course the TF members will not help Satan in any way shape or form! They refuse to believe that Satan is in containment, and figure that he's letting everyone believe that he is for his own nefarious ends. Carpathia owns being "unmasked" and appears on TV without proxies for the first time. He looks roughly like Davros or Snoke. Rather than blaming Satan, he blames having made sacrifices for the greater good.

Baal, Astaroth and Cankerworm are let go and told that they are welcome to make a living as impersonators, if they want, but they are to stay away from their master Satan or face destruction. Predictably, they try to free him, after voting two to one to not try and get help from Christians. Their plan is poorly executed and lands them in containment.

The doomsday clock is ticking inexorably. Although the long-term hopes of the planet are grim, the Unity Army manages to make some areas of Earth function almost as well as they did pre-Tribulation. Notably, by now the Eden fertilizer has leeched all the deep-soil nutrients, so most of Israel is abandoned; the only two places that remain are Jerusalem and Petra, held by the Jewish and Christian remnant respectively.

At the start of the final year, Carpathia issues a decree restoring freedom of religion, noting that he has proven himself to be better than any God through hard work and sharing of the people's suffering, and fears no competition. Some religious groups reemerge, leaving the Unity Government with less control over the world but more control of loyal areas. The first children born after the Rapture are starting to go to school; the first elementary school in the world reopens with great fanfare, relatively small numbers of enrollees, and a renewed feeling of hope. Unsurprisingly, children are (officially or not) treated as very precious, perhaps over-pampered, given extra rations and so on.

The Community Co-Op is busted as in the original timeline, with Chloe being caught and executed - since religious freedom has been mostly restored, the bust happens because the Co-Op is accused of hoarding food and other essentials. Chloe bravely manages to not divulge information about the secret warehouses that Christians have, and is publicly executed after having been granted peace by an angel. However, the angel's ministry is filmed and rebroadcast all over the world; Carpathia dares the Christians to say that the footage is faked - which they cannot do, since it isn't - and spins the story into indicating that God Himself is on the side the hoarders running what is exaggerated as one of the main reasons why there is a food shortage.

The Unity Army by now has mostly converted itself into a civil protection organization, tanks turned into tractors and ships into mobile desalination plants. "Witch hunts" targeting Christians and even people who look like stereotypical angels ensue as the exhasperated populace wants to bring folk justice to hoarders. This results in a spate of avoidable deaths. Christians are supernaturally protected in many cases, but Jews are not and people who happen to look stereotypically angelic aren't either. Eventually, a portion of the Unity Army has to be reactivated - to protect the accused hoarders in Petra and Jerusalem from lynch mobs! Carpathia, ever the man of peace, calls on the Christian leadership to prove their good intentions by offering amnesty to hoarders who share their stashes.

A quick discussion within Trib Force leadership shows that the vast majority of Co-Op assets can be given away to the needy, assuming that the End Times timeline has not been compromise; they quickly decide that it hasn't, and reach an agreement with the people in Jerusalem to share these resources if they officially break off from Global Community aid. Carpathia is furious publically, and condemns the agreement, but privately notes that it was expected and pulls out of Jerusalem. The two cities and the 100-mile long strip of land between them are fenced in and effectively treated as their own territory. Like Pontius Pilate, Carpathia publically announces that he washes his hand of the whole area. (Privately, he uses up the remaining stockpile of nuclear weapons to build an atomic minefield just outside the protected area).

There are six months left. Some smuggling takes place due to the fact that the strip touches a part of the Dead Sea, which is easily reachable by river. A small part of the Unity Army remilitarizes to guard the strip; seizing the reorganization, Carpathia reorganizes the Unity Army into a much smaller force dedicated to that task, and assigns the bulk of its former assets to the civilian land reclamation agency that has been de-facto runnng the show for years. He also publicly promises to disband even this small army in a year and a half. A brief online exchange between Tsion and a reclamation foreman can be summed up with "There is no year and a half left!" "Well whose fault is that?"

Extensive damage to forests and marine vegetation is starting to lower the oxygen concentration in the air; everything else can be fixed if there's time to fix it - flowers and bees are slowly returning, concentrating people in safe zones has allowed nature to grow over much of the world's urbanized landscape, gas shortage and a push towards solar panels has alleviated pollution - but the oxygen problem is dependent on slow-growth vegetation, and probably cannot be fixed. Thanks to the loss of biodiversity due to the Bowl Judgement, the best Unity Government prediction (which is kept classified) is that even if the End Times timeline is disrupted, humanity has maybe one chance in three of surviving the next century.

Chaim Rosenweig, who let's not forget is a botanist, has reached similar conclusions: he takes it to the rest of the Trib Force, noting that a raid to retrieve the official-but-classified predictions that he correctly surmises Carpathia has made, accompained with a media blitz online and on TV right after, would expose Carpathia as a fraud and cause many to convert before it's too late.

When the Unity Government gave up Jerusalem to its inhabitants, they would not or could not keep the canals operating, so the Mount of Olives is returning to its original configuration. Carpathia offers to rebuild the canals, and provide free water; the Tribulation Force correctly surmises that he wants to disrupt prophecy and throws a wrench in the negotiation after only a few days of work, thrown in for free by Carpathia to show good will, had started. In fact, the terrain movement caused by such causes the Mount of Olives to settle into something like its original configuration. Carpathia saw this eventuality coming, and the first thing the workers did was bury nuclear mines there, too.

Three month to go. For a show of optimism and for propaganda reasons, Carpathia has authorized a space mission, to reopen the International Space Station. In truth, he hopes to turn it into a more secure containment facility for Astaroth, Baal, Cankerworm and Satan. The mission is a partial success, in that the ISS is reopened, but Baal, the one demon that had been stuck in the unpressurized payload bay manages to escape. Since he can change his appearance at will, Carpathia has little hope of recapturing the former impersonator. Even so, the recovery of space capability allows new satellites to be launched, restoring video communications around the world.

The Tribulation Force are about to launch their caper to expose Carpathia's reclamation plan as a fraud, when Baal comes before them, telling them that if they do not free Satan, the End Times timeline will be disrupted and there will be no deliverance, just a slow decline for life on Earth. Of course, they do not believe him.

The caper is launched, and is successful, due to some supernatural intervention. The Trib Force's raid has the side effect of allowing Baal to turn off containment around the three other demons in a parallel attack that interwined with the main raid. Satan immediately indwells Carpathia again, leaving Baal to take his place and shape in containment.

The Trib Force's announcement that the reclamation plan was always doomed causes some conversions and many riots. Carpathia, indwelt by Satan again, goes on TV and calms the masses with supernatural influence, then makes a show of appearing to regenerate and walks out of his life support rig. Carpathia is shown with his old appearance, although he is still wearing an external pacemaker and ventricular assist pump since Satan could not regenerate his heart. He claims to have figured out how to tap Satan's power for humanity's ends - cut to Baal pretending to be a weakened Satan in the containment system - which will be used to help restore life to the planet until homeostasis is reached again.

Once back in the saddle, Satan does his best to put the End Times timeline back on track by re-occupying Jerusalem and putting Petra under close siege again. However, Carpathia had left specific instructions to his commanders in case a second indwelling occurred: they are to continue with the original plan and lie in their reports to Satan that things have been put back where they were. Satan has supernatural charisma, but it only works locally, and the Unity Army has had to decentralize to cope with the damaged planet they are trying to rebuild: most regional commanders continue following Carpathia's plan.

A proposal to reopen the nuclear power plants that have been obsoleted by solar panels to use as electrolysis devices to replenish oxygen is quickly approved by Carpathia's council; Satan, not understanding what this even is, simply takes credit for the work. The Tribulation force correctly determines this to be yet another attempt to derail prophecy, and manages to raid one of the power plants, shutting it down. Afterwards, there is question about whether they have become the bad guys - they did just disable an oxygen-generating machine after all. A few moments of prayer clear the matter.

With two weeks to go before the Glorious Appearing, a few plants have been converted despite setbacks and that one act of sabotage; it becomes obvious that the oxygen levels can be maintained for a long time before nuclear fuel becomes scarce, hopefully giving the ecosystem time to adapt. Satan takes credit for this on TV, but is starting to realize that his men are only following his orders when he is in direct contact with them. He does not dare unindwell Carpathia to ask him what's going on, though, because last thime he did, he ended up locked in a containment system.

The Glorious Appearing happens exactly on schedule. The problem is, of course, that there is no Unity Army sieging Petra; the fields around the walled city are wide open, with the rare plant growing there. The only evidence of a siege is a fence warning that if the fence is trespassed by people who do not have the Mark, anything from motion-detecting sentry guns to nuclear mines may go off (In fact, the sentry guns are somewhat glitchy and have let the Trib Force out on their raids as explained before, and the nuclear mines are designed to go off only upon Carpathia's death).

Jesus solves the problem by simply teleporting the Unity Army members who were supposed to be at the siege just outside Petra's gate. About a million people were sleeping in other time zones, or doing reclamation work, or patrolling, and all of a sudden they are in desert-camo fatigues, holding guns that they haven't touched in months, around a city that they had written off. Tsion goes onto the walls and accuses the Unity Army of violating their own unilateral cease-fire. One of the field commanders recognises what is going on, and issues an immediate order to put weapons down and walk out. Satan, still indwelling Carpathia, goes on radio and countermands the order. The people operating the satellite link shut it down and broadcast a counter-order to drop weapons and walk away from a library of prerecorded orders made by Carpathia before being re-indwelt. This prevents Satan from commanding his army unless he's there directly, so he gets in a jeep with Leone Fortunato and moves towards Petra.

There is a brief, and somewhat surreal, conversation between Tsion and the field commander in which Tsion again accuses the Unity Army of violating their own ceasefire, the field commander points out that they were teleported there and they are in fact dropping their weapons and leaving, and Tsion haranguing the commander for treachery and aggression. (Note that unlike in the original timeline, Buck is still alive at this stage).

As the supposed Unity Army troops walk away from Petra's wall, they are teleported back where they were. When this happens, some of them panic, and shoot in the air or even at the walls with their rifles. A particularly unlucky shot hits Buck, ensuring that he dies as scheduled. Moments later, the light of Jesus has covered the earth (the eastern hemisphere anyway) and He is slowly moving to Petra. All those in Petra who needed it are healed by His presence. By now, Satan is close enough to the army in Petra that he can use the jeep's radio directly, without depending on a relay; his supernatural command forces some of the reluctant soldiers to obey when he commands a charge, and that's all Jesus needs to explode them in a shower of blood. A few of the people who found themselves driving tanks in the back manage to drive off, simply because they were out of range, but they too are teleported next to the wall and exploded.

Jesus leads the believers into a magical sprint between Petra and Jerusalem as Satan, still driven by Leone Fortunato, retreats there; as in the original timeline, the two get stuck in the mud created by all the blood on the sand, and Leone has to get out and push. As in the original timeline, Jesus reaches Bozrah; however, the town has been mostly abandoned, the only Unity Government presence being a few people to operate and guard the solar panel plant that had been built there. Like in Petra, a number of Unity Army workers who used to be soldiers are teleported to the village and then immediately blown inside-out so that the Supper of the Great God can take place. A number of key Global Community systems such as nuclear plants and submarines recognize having been supernaturally unmanned by dead man's switch systems that are designed to safely shut everything down; by Carpathia's orders before being reindwelt, they trip otherwise.

The remaining Trib Force members find a Hummer and go on ahead as Jesus, still followed at a distance by believers from Petra, reaches the Valley of Megiddo and finds it empty; the canals to Jerusalem have been turned into a pipeline. Yet again, workers who used to be soldiers, and soldiers who were guarding other posts, are teleported where they were supposed to be. This time there are also a number of horses and, for the simple reason that quite a lot of Army horses were used for meat months ago, a number of horse skeletons.

While this happens, Rayford, Mac, and Abdullah chase after Nicolae and Leon in a Hummer, watching the tremendous carnage as the majority of the remaining Unity Army forces are killed at the Valley of Megiddo amidst the words of Jesus and the hailstones that fall at the seventh Bowl Judgment. Nicolae and Leon are traveling to Jerusalem in the Royal Humvee with Viv Ivins when this happens, during which Viv Ivins is killed by one of the massive hailstones. God turns the marshes of blood to ice, which soon melts and becomes a thick mire. As Satan and Leon try to flee to Jerusalem, all the people in Petra are given supernatural power to travel from there to Jerusalem by running at 70 miles per hour.

For the final time, when Jesus and Satan finally reach Jerusalem, Unity Army reservists and civil protection workers who used to be active-duty are teleported under the Temple Mount, some on horseback, most on top of a pile of equine bones. Satan gives this extremely confusd contingent the order to charge an equally confused contingent of Jew holdouts who were minding their own business in Jerusalem and are likewise teleported in a defensive position above the Temple Mount. The Unity troops are afflicted with a flesh-dissolving plague that afflicts both humans and horses. Satan tries to curse God, but the moment he tries, a global earthquake occurs that levels all the mountains, destroying the beauty of the Earth, and elevates Jerusalem. The seismic event is picked up by sensors all over the globe, putting what is still working of Global Community infrastructure into last-chance-contingency mode.

Satan, still followed by Leon who seems to be the only one still affected by the Devil's supernatural charisma, find two surviving horses - the terrain has been made hard to handle by wheeled vehicles by now, and neither of them know how to drive a tank - and head to the Mount of Olives. The instant Jesus steps foot on the mountain, it splits into a valley running east to west; the nuclear mines planted there early explode from being dislodged, and take out both the Unity Army reservists and the Jewish rebels. Jesus is left looking onto the two craters that are supposed to be the Valley of Jehosaphat for a few long moments, during which a series of seismic aftershocks shape the valley as it was supposed to be.

Jesus enter Jerusalem through the Golden Gate. Satan and Leon attempt to flee on horseback, but to no avail, as the Archangel Michael captures them. The few automated flak emplacements still operating have no effect on the Archangel. Satan, Fortunato, and the three spirits are brought in front of Jesus for judgement. The three spirits humble themselves, but are destroyed. Leon bows before Jesus, but is sentenced to the Lake of Fire.

Carpathia does not bow, but his body fails him when Jesus casts Satan out of him, so he does end up bowing. Free again, Carpathia quotes Stalin to Jesus - "Kill one man, and you are a murderer; kill a million, and you are a general; kill them all, and you are God." Michael demands that Carpathia confess that Jesus is the Christ, which Carpathia readily does, adding that might doesn't make right and being a god doesn't make you good.

Jesus harangues Carpathia about allying with Satan and squandering his gifts. Carpathia answers that Jesus got it exactly wrong, and that he wanted to free humanity of both Yahweh and Satan. He then accuses Satan of having worked for Yahweh the entire time, as is written in the book of Job. Jesus ignores him, and demands that Carpathia confess that his life was a waste. Carpathia answers "Make me" and turns off his pacemaker, but right he dies, Jesus makes him by moving his mouth and tongue, and then throws him and Leon into the lake of fire. Jesus also deals with Satan, having Michael tie him up in a chain and also throwing him into the lake of fire.

The contingency systems that are left working - most of the land systems are gone after the global earthquake, but the seaborne systems largely survived - detect Carpathia's pacemaker having been turned off. Nuclear submarines which have been largely left unmanned by the Unity Army teleport respond to their dead man's handles and prepare to perform their scheduled resurfacing to receive radio orders; most of them respond correctly. All the remaining nuclear mines go off, finally destroying Petra and cutting a corridor of destruction between that city and Jerusalem, which ends up being surrounded by a ring of radioactive craters.

When the gathering has ended, the Trib Force members end up having dinner in Jerusalem as per the original timeline. All around them, the sky is scorched by radioactive clouds and ion storms.

On the day following the Lord's return, all the people of the earth, including believers, are gathered at the new Valley of Jehosaphat for the "sheep and goats" judgement by Jesus himself. Around the world, the submarines have emerged, and with the Unity Government systems having gone into contingency mode, receive no radio orders. Those submarines that had been set up properly by the vanished crew recognize this as an attack having succeeded, and prepare for automated second-strike launch. Approximately fifteen percent fail to do so.

All the believers who were considered the "sheep" Jesus had granted them to enter into His kingdom for caring for "the least of His brethren", and all the others that were the "goats", that didn't care for "the least of His brethren", Jesus does not give their day in court to the nonbelievers who had sacrificed much in the last few years in order to provide material and emotional support to their fellow humans, and sends every last one of them into everlasting punishment. Everything is quiet save for the hastily set up megaphones by some Unity Army relief workers, who used their last day on Earth to build a tape loop that denounces Jesus for cheating and lists the many instances of nonbelievers having made and kept vows of hospitality, clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and so on.

Amongst the throng of believers are the children of the Tribulation, those who grew up during the last seven years. The oldest are old enough to understand the last message of a dead civilization. The memories of their parents turned inside-out or swallowed by the earth are fresh and traumatic, and mix with the simple account delivered by damned men's voices. They listen. They learn. They will never forget.

After this, Jesus rewarded the Old Testament saints for their faith, and then rewarded the Tribulation martyrs for their faithful witness. When this was done, Rayford is happily reunited with his wife Irene and his son Raymie, now fully grown and having been deprived of his formative years, as well as with his friends and family members that went on to be with Jesus ahead of him. Buck (now going by his first name Cameron, since there isn't anything left to buck) and Chloe re-unite with Kenny, Tsion and Chaim are re-united as well as Abdullah and his wife Yasmine. The ICBMs launch. Rayford amusingly tells Irene that she is entitled to "one cosmic I-told-you-so" before they are all re-united with the rest of the resurrected members of the Tribulation force. Roll credits.

A post-credit scene shows the ICBMs completing the ascending half of their ballistic arc and converging onto Jerusalem, just as the ice canopy that will surround the world during the Millennial Kingdom starts to form.


	3. The Other Light Gambit

Problem: Generals are always ready to fight the last war. In TOL's case, they had 1000 years and yet they try to use the same tactic that they know didn't work last time. WHY?

* * *

Incompetence

TOL is generally shown as fairly incompetent in Kingdom Come. However, these have to be exceptions in the overall plot: much like Carpathia, whose ascent to power happens in a time skip, TOL simply has to get a lot done in the 900 years of the Millennial Kingdom that we are not shown. This is probably because the authors don't want to show us their bad guys winning, and because every event in every book is shown from the perspective of a Christian caracter (for a series that has God as the protagonist, interestingly, we never get omniscient perspective, instead dealing with this or that main character traveling around to witness this or that event. Even the Last Battle is shown through Rayford's supernaturally enhanced but otherwise failing eyesight; we have no way to tell whether Rayford is a reliable narrator, and there are many hints in the earlier books that he isn't.

One interesting note to make is at the end of chapter 32, after the main time-skip, in which we see how decrepit the Natural characters are with about 200 years still to go in the Millennium. There, TOL is shown as having managed to revert some of the changes that God enacted upon the Holy Land after the Appearing: Millennial Israel is shown as a green, fertile land... except at the end, when Rayford is old and complains of feeling chilly even in the desert heat. This is significant: since Rayford is at COT's main campus in Israel, which is close enough to the Ultimate Temple that it's within walking distance, it means that the desert has reclaimed most if not all of the Holy Land. This is unlikely to happen naturally since the ecosystem is Divinely managed... so we're looking at an active terraforming program, and there's only one faction that would bring the desert to Israel, perhaps as a show of power, or perhaps as a test for other plans: The Other Light. Certainly, the fact that they have brought the desert back to the Holy Land, in specific defiance of Divine will, appears prominently in their propaganda.

There's also the simple fact that TOL goes from a fringe group to an industrial and military giant over time: TOL have enough industrial might to build an enormous army that operates at WW2 levels of technology (we are told that they have warships and missile launchers, although interestingly, they lack an air force), enough scientific might to perform hostile terraforming against Israel, and enough political might to grow their ranks from dozens to billions despite the obvious handicap of a much shortened lifespan. So, we must rule out incompetence: TOL may be misguided, but they have skills. In fact, the authors go out of their way to pointing out how Kenny Williams makes sure that TOL shifts their recruiting priorities from "dopers and alkies" to intellectually capable and skilled people!

* * *

Insanity

It's entirely possible that people who join The Other Light, The Only Light or any of the other factions are either insane or go insane by the time they realize that they have no hope of winning; the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, and this fits what's going on to a tee.

The problem is that this sort of insanity precludes being able to keep to a plan for many generations, especially if that plan involves tanks, missile launchers, and warships. We know that there are no wars or even rumors of wars until the closing years of the Millennium, which means that any TOL civil wars would have to happen right before the Last Battle, or else happen in a Dune-esque "war of assassins" fashion that goes largely undetected by the outside world.

Insane people in charge of warfighting equipment don't upgrade, maintain, and train with that equipment for centuries without incidents. So, we have to rule out insanity (although it's very likely that TOL has had a Caligula or two at its helm during its 950-year history).

* * *

Inevitability

God is just puppeteering everybody, or at least a significant part of the population (the Last Army is supposed to be a billion strong; if you consider the amount of support personnel a modern army must have, this means that at minimum, at the end of the Millennium Christians are once again in the minority).

This basically turns Kingdom Come into a Lovecraftian cosmic horror story, in which nobody has any choice - being Glorified maps eerily well to being eaten first... This is possibly what the authors believe, but there is really no way to analyse this scenario without succumbing to madness or solipsism. We cannot strictly speaking rule out inevitability, but inevitability reduces the whole book (if not the whole series) to us watching God play with army men, by Himself.

This is more extreme than Calvinism: it essentially accuses God of solipsism, and implies that maybe He doesn't have any choice either. I doubt that this was the authors' intention.

* * *

Innovation

TOL had 1000 years to come up with a better solution, and their stated recruitment doctrine is to poach the best and brightest. I propose a solution in "Countdown": many if not most members of the Last Army are already damned to start with. They have accepted their ultimate fate, and are sacrificing themselves for the greater good so that another plan may be enacted.

Interestingly, TOL's great army is shown to feature ground and naval forces, but no airplanes as they advance towards the Temple. Could they simply be elsewhere? The all-consuming firestorm at the Last Battle is shown to move fairly slowly, slow enough for a modern aircraft or even a 1950s military jet to easily avoid. What if Rayford was Raptured just in time to avoid seeing the Ultimate Temple carpet-bombed? This is possible, but there's simply nothing in the text that hints at it.

Maybe there is a simpler explanation: the Last Army is itself nothing but a huge military ruse. Now, what would be the point of applying maskirovka (military deception) against an enemy who is either omniscient, or close enough to omniscient that it makes no practical difference? Simple. The power of God may be limitless, but God has limited Himself by giving Himself a script to follow, and then following it to the letter - we see this in the other Left Behind books, where very often things happen simply because they have to happen according to Revelation or the book of Daniel. It is written that Israel will become prosperous when the desert blooms, and so this happens, regardless of the obvious political and economic facts about the region. And so on.

TOL strategists likely figure out that, should they break from the prophetic timeline, God would simply exercise His omnipotence and do something like resetting the universe, or sending everyone to Hell instantly, or who knows what else. Therefore, unlike CATS in my AU, they put effort into keeping things "on rails" as a way to effectively limiting the amount of force that God is going to bring to the table. They know that they have to lose the Last Battle in order to win the war.

How can they do this? TOL is definitely playing for all the marbles here: the very survival of humanity is at stake here. An obvious exit strategy would be to send colony spaceships to settle on other planets, or even nearby stars by use of a generation ship - an organization that can arm a billion soldiers in 900 years can definitely do a Moon shot or a manned Mars mission. The question then becomes, how far away is far enough? "New Earth and new Heaven" in Kingdom Come specifically refer to the planet and to the sky canopy above it; the rest of the cosmos is left alone. That said, Jesus' rolling wall of fire that destroys the Last Army looks a fair amount like a nova or gamma ray burst (the atmosphere is lit on fire by secondary radiation) coming from the Sun, so an interstellar escape may be the only option unless TOL has managed to build "fallout shelters" that can hide behind Jupiter or Saturn's magnetic fields.

The Omega chronicle (which you can read at http：／／www．f3．to／omega／ ) tackles some of these topics. In it, to ensure continuity of operations given their operatives' comparatively short lifespan, TOL create an AI (in the modern sense, not in the HAL 9000 sense) to handle day to day business. The AI's expert system is quickly taken over by a group of sysadmins with a variety of agendas: despite the infighting, TOL becomes able to enact a strategy that gives God everything He wants while succeeding in preserving Humanity beyond the White Throne judgement.

The solution presented there is by all means not the only one: the chronicle has been written in the form of a game specifically to encourage others to be creative about this problem.

* * *

As part of the research for my fanfiction, I have recently been able to interview creationist evangelist Kent Hovind, the author of the canopy theory that is used in Kingdom Come to explain why there is no night. In "Cendrillon", I postulate that the canopy would have a lower layer of water, an upper layer of ice, and exist at approximately 70 kilometers up; Mr. Hovind said that he envisions the canopy as being significantly lower on top of the atmosphere (16km or so) and composed of supercooled vitrified ice about 7~10 centimeters in thickness. This would require a significant rewrite in the stories of both Cendrillon and the Omega, but if anything, it would make their job simpler: no water layer means no need to make the capsule waterproof, and a lower canopy height means both that a smaller rocket is required to reach it and that space missions leaving from the top of the canopy could make more efficient use of the Hoberth effect. Cendrillon and the Omega have, in fact, been "playing on hard mode" this entire time!

* * *

My whole point is that Kingdom Come does not necessarily have to be the story of Humanity's struggle ending with a bang and then a whimper: even taking Rayford's point of view in the last chapter as what happens, rather than what he perceives as he experiences the second Rapture (after having had his sight and mental faculties supernaturally restored following at least two centuries of decrepitude... or so he thinks, anyway) there is plenty of room for a part of Humanity to have survived, out there in the endless black.

In conclusion... as much as the text has a lot in common with a Cosmic Horror story, there is plenty of room for hope for Humanity in "Left Behind".


	4. Dead Man's Handle

(Takes off from "Glorious Appearing" / "Triumphant Return")

"Ultimately your plans and your regime have failed. And now, who do you say that I am?"

Silence. Then a weak voice said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who died for the sins of the world and rose again the third day as the Scriptures predicted."

"And what does that say about you and what you made of your life?"

"I confess that my life was a waste," Nicolae whispered. "Worthless. A mistake. I rebelled against the God of the universe, whom I now know loved me."

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.

When Gabriel moved, a hole a yard in diameter opened in the ground, and a stinky smell burst forth. Flames erupted from the hole, and the crowd backed away. Michael walked Nicolae and Leon forward. Leon cried like a baby and tried to get away, but Michael pushed him into the fire, his cries fading as he fell. Then Michael pushed Nicolae in, and the man's screams echoed throughout Jerusalem.

The hole closed, and the Beast and the False Prophet were gone.

After an appreciable fraction of a second, 22000 miles into the sky, a geostationary satellite receiver found itself no longer picking up Nicolae Carpathia's "heartbeat" signal, from the bug he wore on his person. After three missed "beats", the satellite - including a similar, but larger, transmitter whose job it was to repeat the signal - let its own program finish, turning off irrevocably.

Back down, across the hills of Megiddo and right next to Jesus and the archangels, a number of similarly constructed receivers lost transmission. Simple analog circuits that had been energizing retainer solenoids once every time Nicolae's heart beat, brought into service after his indwelling, stopped doing their jobs and left the solenoids dry of electric charge.

With the magnetic fields gone, the solenoids let go of their heavy cargo - doughnut-shaped lumps of enriched uranium built in a configuration that had only ever been used once in history: the Hiroshima bomb had never even required a test, being an extremely simple mechanism once the right mix of refined uranium was in place in te right shape.

Obedient to the law of gravity, these lumps fell into matching doughnut holes made of the same material.

Knowing how supernatural power would disrupt any high-tech means of retaliation, Carpathia had ordered these old, fail-deadly designs to be brought out of mothballs for a small number of nuclear mines deployed under the Mount of Olives: they worked by basic physics, with little that could deviate from a simple order of operations and nothing that could do so significantly. The decommissioning of all the world's remaining modern nukes had left Carpathia's engineers plenty of material to work with to build using the older design.

In turn, all the leftover modern nuclear fuel derived from the decommissioning had been buried around these simple machines. Pressurized canisters of deuterium provided the third layer for what was effectively the largest, least efficient thermonuclear device ever built.

Each step in the initiation chain right up and through the formation of the initial supercritical mass was designed to be triggered by a dead man's handle, something stopping rather than starting, specifically to prevent supernatural interference. Nicolae had hired Russian scientists, German engineers, Italian caterers, Swiss accountants and French prostitutes to ensure workmanship of the best possible quality.

While all this was going on, the Archangel Gabriel addressed the people. "Jesus is the true light, who gives light to everyone..."

And then there was light.

Jesus, strong in His divinity, was left untouched by the all-consuming nuclear fire. All around Him, a glass crater the size of a county. The Mount of Olives had not split in two; it had been vaporized. Nothing was left save for the Son of God, and a precarious pillar of semi-molten rock directly under His feet.

All the believers in the world, supernaturally gathered in front of their Savior, had been turned to protons. There was no trace of Satan. There was no trace of the archangels. There was no trace of anything - only dirty glass below and a shadowless glow above.

Jesus surveyed the beautiful desolation, the Earth scorched to the bone horizon to horizon, the sky still raging with two dozen mushroom clouds mingling with each other, ash grey and dull red. Then, the pillar of rock under His feet gave out, and He fell flat on His ass.

All across the planet, with the exception of the devastated Middle Eastern zone, the emergency broadcasting system's timer counted to three hundred, took over the airwaves, and broadcast through every surviving speaker to the remaining population of the Earth, with audio snow and digital skips over the immense amount of  
electromagnetic noise created by the largest nuclear initiation in history.

It was Carpathia's voice, recorded before his indwelling, and long before his surrender. It had been a gamble to build something that would obliterate a measurable fraction of the world if anything went wrong with it, but Nicolae, before realizing that dull-witted Satan would call the shots for the second half of his term, had calculated that it would pay off. If the fall is the only thing, how one falls mattered. The prerecorded message, by necessity, had to be somewhat generic. Unlike the wretch now in the Lake of Fire, the recording let Nicolae's older confident, bombastic self have the last word.

"Friends! Citizens! HUMANS! Your leader, Nicolae Carpathia, has sacrificed himself to bring an end to the horror. It is possible that the Risen Savior, the one who would destroy the world and genocide its people, still walks among you. His power is broken. The grip of prophecy has been shattered. Here is the last command of your leader, the last request of your rescuer, the dying wish of a man who gave all.

If He is still out there, I ask you, shun the Nazarene. Where He walks, make way. What food or water He wants, let him take. What He speaks, answer not. If He finds your door, open not. If He boards a train, stop it and get off, make Him walk. Even as He walks out of the disaster He is responsible for, let Him experience the Hell of solitude. Let Him see, as the world rises from the ashes by human hands, that He is no longer welcome in it!

The world has been sick, but it can be well again, and there is work to do. It has been an honor to serve Humanity."

At the epicenter, on the bottom of the crater, Jesus looked up. The sky had been darkened by iron clouds. His perfect flesh and His immaculate tunic were glowing slightly with the blue flame of Cherenkov radiation. The immutable prophecy dictated that He next split the Mount of Olives in two. That was clearly no longer an option, there was no such place anymore. He picked a direction, and started walking. He would have to start anew.

Everywhere else, raid sirens turned off after the announcement. By and large, people settled their shoulders and went back to work. The world was a mess. It was over. What else was there to do?

 _(I don't particularly like this one: the analysis certainly makes sense especially considering that LaHaye and Jenkins go out of their way to remove nuclear weapons from the equation for the LB books, and writing a story around it was quite easy, but the world that it results in has no Christians in it, which to me is about as uninteresting as a world that has only Christians in it. However, it would force Jesus to literally start from scratch from a very hostile crowd, which is an interesting alternate interpretation for the Millennium)_


End file.
